At this time he himself was composing a novel that evoked his own childhood home in Odessa; his novel, The Five, (1935) paints a picture of a world he loved. In it he weaves local and cosmopolitan myths, by for example, recalling that," The mouse is sad to be caught in the cat's paws."
According to a book review of the latest of many biographies of Jabotinsky, (Marat Grinberg's in Tablet of Jabotinsky: A Life, by Hillel Halkin, ((2014)), The Five
...was ... an elegy about and a eulogy to the Russian-Jewish experience, ...[and] also the whole Jewish world which, to reiterate, Jabotinsky sensed was on the edge of extinction.
This is only superficially a contradiction-- international Zionism versus love of home,-- the kind of false dilemma academics love to churn up. In fact, Jabotinsky's
"... whole life projected the idea that one could be both: an artist and a politician, a Zionist and a citizen of the world."
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